Working with Cursor

Cursor, especially with agents, is a game changer. I was pretty skeptical going into this. I'm not a fan of VSCode; I find the Vim implementation to be lacking and the decisions they make around the editor to be annoying. There's not one feature I can point at, it just feels clunky. Admittedly this is a personal issue. I just don't interface well with VSCode in general, so an AI-powered editor based on VSCode was not top of my list to check out. I was wrong, this thing is dope.

Having an agent directly in an editor is really where the sauce is. I've been working with AI for a little bit now in different capacities. Co-pilot has provided great completion for a long time now. Chat-based AI with ChatGPT and Claude has been great for odd errors, remembering syntax, and working in languages I'm not especially familiar with. But getting context into those chats and copying code out of them was a mild annoyance. I thought that solving that mild annoyance would be a mild boon to my productivity and I was wrong. It's maybe the biggest boon to my productivity since I learned vim bindings.

The Co-pilot plugin to JetBrains was the closest I had got to an agent before this. It provided a way to ask questions about a codebase or specific lines of code, but it wasn't the greatest at gathering context. Cursor is.

Half of writing code is remembering syntax of libraries you want to use. Cursor solves that issue. I no longer need to remember the exact syntax of how to set up a docker-compose file with a webserver and database. Instead, I can tell Cursor to create one and adjust. It's not always accurate and it's rarely the best implementation, but it puts together a start very quickly.

This feels like rapid prototyping at its best. You tell it what you want and after some back and forth, you have something you can start to modify by hand. I'm going to be getting into specifics soon but for now, I just want to say: try Cursor out and see what you can build.